Nissan’s autonomous chair is your line waiting buddy

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Nissan’s ProPILOT tech might mostly be used to help provide its cars with autonomous driving features, but a new project puts it into a chair. Yes, a chair.

The chair propels itself, detecting the chair ahead of it and keeping a fixed distance between itself and its neighbor, as it moves along a predefined path. It’s less flexible than the chairs in Wall-E (kudos to Megan for noticing the similarity), but perfect for alleviating the pains of an age-old human tradition – standing in line.

ProPILOT Chair is designed to make it a lot easier to wait for something, whether it’s the latest iPhone or just a seat at the city’s hottest brunch joint. It’s also going to actually be used in real-world applications, which is more than I expected at first glance from what seems so obviously like a marketing ploy.

Nissan is accepting applications between now and December 27 for restaurants in Japan who are interested in providing these for customers looking to take a seat and be ferried in queue while they wait. Applicants chosen from that group will get outfitted with the smart chairs in 2017, and between now and October 2 a public display at Nissan’s global HQ will show off six of the chairs operating in a live lineup simulation.

The whole thing still sounds vaguely ridiculous, but don’t discount it completely; a lot of carmakers, including Nissan competitor Toyota, are looking at solving future mobility in a broad sense, which also includes providing at-home and in-city solutions for an aging population. Also, I’ll definitely use one of these chairs to slide between work and gaming stations at home as soon as possible.

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OverviewNissan Motor currently manufactures vehicles in 20 countries around the globe and offers products and services worldwide.
Nissan sells more than 60 models under the Nissan, Infiniti and Datsun brands. In fiscal year 2015, the company sold more than 5.4 million vehicles globally, generating revenue of 12.2 trillion yen. Nissan engineers, manufactures and markets the world's best-selling all-electric …